The minimal structure and design reflects the ethos of other pared-down blogging platforms such as the US rival Medium, but the British pair have incorporated Ghost as a not-for-profit and are using income to fund development of the site.

"If Facebook came to me tomorrow, and said ‘here’s $1bn, we want to integrate Ghost into Facebook’ … no matter what the human side of me wants to do, I cannot.”

“We don’t want to make millions,” he says. “I personally, categorically do not want to make millions. I had huge ambitions for making a million before I was 25, the startup dream… but then I realised if I had a lot of money, I would buy a Lamborghini and a house, and six months later I would just be bored.”

The Ghost UI. Photograph: tryghost.org

Pledging to build an interface focused on writing and editing blogposts, the software raised almost £200,000 from 5,000 backers on Kickstarter in May. Many expressed frustration with WordPress, the dominant blogging platform, whose tools have become bloated and unwieldy.

“Bloggers are only interested in one thing – their content broadcast on the internet – the rest is noise,” says developer and designer Chris Southam, explaining why he backed the project.

“Current systems get in the way of this, with a ton of options and configurations to provide an all-singing and dancing experience, while the content is limited to typing into a box the size of a postcard. Madness!”

As well as simplicity and focus, the developers claim that the plugin architecture will make the platform more expandable than other easy-to-use competitors, such as Tumblr.

Using Ghost on a tablet. Photograph: Rick Nunn

Until 2011, O’Nolan was the deputy head of the WordPress UI Group, while co-founder Hannah Wolfe quit a job as senior developer at London printing firm Moo.com.

The software will be fully open-source, meaning that any developer can use the basic code free of charge. The revenue for further development will be generated through a shared-hosting service, aimed at users who don’t have the ability to set up a server themselves.

If users have anything to worry about, it’s that Ghost may overreach itself. “Less is more when it comes to Ghost in the future. Hopefully they can handle the pressure not to move to far from their original plan,” says Southam.

While O’Nolan is proud of the software’s simplicity, he has big plans for it.

“Who it’s really targeted at, where I hope it goes … is to be genuinely a platform that can help large publications, something that can take some of the problems that people like the Guardian, like the Times, like CNN experience every single day.”

But how will he keep the platform easy to use for beginners, while still powerful enough for enterprise? “The problems are not insignificant. It’s going to be really, really fun to tackle.”

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